Marketing Teams: Simplifying the Planning Process with 5 Key Points

Your team is established, you can finish each other’s sentences, the organization trusts you, do you really need to take the time to develop a marketing plan that no one will ever actually read? No. But you do need a strategy outline that is shareable with your team members, as well as your exec team. 

Your annual strategy outline is not the time for any marketing fluff. Stick to what’s important. What are the company priorities and how to do they translate to what your team needs to do? 

We recommend including these 5 points:

1.    TEAM: Snapshot of your team to serve as a reminder of how many (or how few) there are of you

2.    BUDGET: Total departmental budget with any major categories broken out

3.    WHAT: Company goals 

4.    HOW: How will your team support each company goal? (don’t get too far in the weeds here and allow the ability to flex a little throughout the year.)

• Goal

• Timeline

• Target audience

• Major campaign or initiative associated with goal

• Who and what tools will actually get this done?

• Challenges or Risks associated

• Success metrics

5.    NEEDS: Additional resources needed in the year to make the company successful? This way your exec team knows that your success is dependent on getting that additional person and they aren’t surprised with the request mid-year when budgets start to tighten.

Defining what your team will be working on throughout the year will ultimately help assure that everyone is on the same page instead of just assuming that you all understand the priorities and are moving in the same direction…which let’s face it, is the number one problem in most organizations.

If you keep it simple, we guarantee you will surprise yourself at how frequently you refer back to your outline. Cheers to a productive year!